The forum code itself is loading in about 2 - 2.5 seconds. This is pretty slow, and could be faster if:

1) Your host gave you more CPU2) You used a memcached server (probably not an option with cheap shared hosting)

As 422 said, static resources can slow down the perceived loading time as well. Factoring in browser caching, the overall page load time seems to be about 4 seconds, with the HTML taking up more than half of that. It seems like your server is just slow, even on static files. Look into better hosting.

I found out what the problem was. My new host has a different PHP interpreter so I had to chmod my cache folders. Now it's loading much faster. Thanks though.

And I have another problem. With the update to 2.0.18.1 (I was running RC2) I can't get to the /utility/update/ page without it saying bonk.mysql_free_result() expects parameter 1 to be resource, boolean given

When I enable debug and view a discussion, I see a box with error messages on the top left (which gets cut off), but here there is no bonk page.

Care to briefly extoll the virtues of your hosting packages? It's kind of like WordPress.com, right? Where we don't have FTP access, but everything is sort of taken over and made to run smoothly by the "powers that be"?

@DanielSchulzJackson That's the idea. We have spent a great deal of time tweaking both Vanilla and our hardware and software infrastructure to ensure that it is fast. Everything from memory caching, to CDNs, to ensuring that the available plugins are well coded. You'd be surprised at how big of a performance impact even 1 badly coded plugin can have.

Our forums reside on custom built hosting clusters containing many servers, not just one. This allows us to efficiently scale our resources based on the load our forum exerts. Each cluster starts with two loadbalancers. Only one is used at a time, while the other one monitors the first in real time, ready to take over in case of a failure of any kind. This is called "Hot Failover", and it helps keep our forums running even when something goes wrong.

Dedicated Resources

When the active loadbalancer receives a request, it forwards it to one of the cluster's web nodes. There are always at least 2 nodes in any cluster, and the loadbalancers monitor them in real time so that if any of them go down they are immediately removed from the pool and their requests are redirected to other nodes. This is far superior to a single dedicated server because it allows our traffic (and hardware risk) to be spread over many different systems and benefit from the resulting structural resilience. As our forum grows, we add additional web nodes to compensate for the extra traffic. This is done seamlessly without requiring downtime or hardware changes. Again, far superior to hosting on a single dedicated server.

Monitoring

We have an advanced monitoring system custom built for Vanilla Forums that keeps track of each server within each cluster. This allows us to react extremely quickly when things go wrong, and to compensate for changes in traffic within minutes. The monitoring system continuously evaluates the 'health' of each cluster and recommends changes to the configuration (adding, removing servers) depending on current load and trends.

@422 Obviously all the systems are heavily firewalled to prevent unauthorized access. Additionally, software acting as a service daemon (like mysql, memcached, etc) are all configured to accept connections only from within the Vanilla network.

Guilty confession - I'm a customization fiend. I understand that's the key limitation of the hosted options, just as it is with most instances of wordpress.com service.

Example: Our site is very pinterest-oriented. Lots of young moms learning how to parent. So I want fileupload with pinterest-dimensions output, and 2 different "pin it" buttons, along with facebook "like" and nothing else.